Applying Lateral Wisdom to Personal, Organizational, and Church Learning

Insight

April 13, 2010

Greg Mortenson failed in his attempt to climb K2, the second highest mountain on earth. Yet a lesson was gained from that experience that we can all learn from. With K2 in sight, he began building schools that would change the lives of hundreds of children and his own.

February 22, 2010

I explored what frog designer Adam Richardson calls X-problems. In this post I go deeper into exploring the differences between wicked problems and X-problems.

Why is public education facing more than just wicked problems, but X-problems?

For public schools these X-problems might be a question of experience and expectation.

Adam Richardson, in his new book Innovation X, identified several factors that differentiate X-problems from wicked problems and as you will see they point to issues of experience and expectation in public schools.

More and Better Competition: The presence of competition, and competitors that are getting better and more diverse.

“The major element missing from the traditional definition of wicked problems is competition.”

Does public education have competition?

Private Schools

On-line virtual schools

Home School

“Certainly wicked problem address the issue of competition of stakeholders, but primarily stakeholders who have a common interest and will mutually benefit for the solution.”

The competition that public education is facing is expanding in number and diversity.

Private schools, on-line virtual schools, and home schools have no common interest with public schools. They compete for students and parent support alike. They attempt to differentiate themselves through the experience they provide and expectations they meet.

Public schools are teaching based institutions. That’s what they provide. Students are seeking learning and learning is not confined within the walls of public schools. Learning is becoming somewhat akin to the “cloud” of computing. As more and more great teaching goes online, students will be able to access more content, great content, in virtual and physical space. The learning cloud is going to provide fierce competition to public schools, especially at the secondary level. That is competition.

So the X-problem for public school is what do they do about it?

More Demanding Customers: The need to satisfy more demanding customers and provide superior customer experiences.

“The more informed our customers are and the higher their expectations, the better we will be positioned to demonstrate our differentiation.”

The public is the customer and private, on-line, and home schools are steadily eroding the monopoly that public schools have long held. We as a nation of discriminating consumers are no longer content with things that just work, we demand more. We demand design.

“These differentiation and expectation trends often translate into increased demand for aesthetic qualities of using a product, not just its raw functionality. As Daniel Pink has put it, ‘For business, it’s no longer enough to create a product that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique and meaningful.”

Who wants to send their student to a boring sterile institutionalized buildings, surrounded with fences, lacking any aesthetic beauty, with an crumbling physical infrastructure, out-dated technology and equipment, cramped spaces, etc?

“The term customer experience refers to the qualitative experience of using a new product: how easy it is to use, the emotions that are evoked by it both during and after use, the self-image that the customers feel they are projecting, and of course who well the product satisfies their needs and desires. The customer experience should be considered.”

When the public thinks of public schools do they think?

“…how a product does its job is now as important as what is does.”

Public schools are facing challenges on many fronts, but one of the ones that most education leaders and managers are ignoring is the “how.” It’s not going to be enough to just teach curriculum to students, society is going to demand more than just functional competency.

Nordstrom’s is more than just a department store. Apple desktops and laptops are more that just computers. Disneyland is more than just a few rides. They provide an experience. Does public education provide and experience? Yes, but is it the experience that society demands of them? It’s all about the experience.

Customer Expectations Are Resetting: The need to integrate products of diverse types and origins into comprehensive, coherent systems for customers.

“Customers no longer judge based on solely on comparison with direct competitors; they use standards set elsewhere: my satisfaction with a new dishwasher may be blunted by comparison to the ease of use of my iPod, for example.”

Take the examples I mentioned in the section above. Society is not just going to measure public school against public school or public school against private school, etc. Society is going to start measuring public school against the customer experience of a Nordstrom’s, or the encompassing emotional and sensory experience of a Disneyland. Society is not just going to compare the technology in school, but how that technology experience compares to the design and ease of use provided by the iPod and iTunes.

Systems, Not Products: The need to integrate products of diverse types and origins into comprehensive, coherent systems for customers.

“What often goes unrecognized is that every product is part of a system.”

Everything at our public school is a product, but is also part of a system. The problem for public schools is that the products are not being integrated to produce an excellent system. Different text, different standards, Curriculum covers things not on the test. The test assesses things not in the curriculum. New technology doesn’t work with old technology. They myriad of differences in policies, procedure, rules, regulations, organizations, etc. make it difficult teacher, student, and parent alike to navigate through all these differences.

Society is looking for results, but results with an experience. The system that has developed around public education provides varying results and virtually ignores experience. We are ignoring the “how” of what we do.

“Developing complex integrated systems is the new order, and it forces pieces of a company to come together and collaborate in ways that organizational silos had not previously required or even allowed.”

When a teacher, principal, or other school employees says to parent, “That’s just not the way it works.” Or “I can’t do that because we are not allowed.” or “I know it doesn’t make sense, but that is just the reality.” we demonstrating to the parent, to society, that our system won’t work for them. We are not able to provide the experience they seek or meet their expectations.

So what do we do?

Emergent Clarity: Clarity about the problem emerges slowly, as with wicked problems, but iterative approaches to solving them are necessary, in contrast to the one-shot deal of wicked problems.

In other words we need a lot of ideas, we need to try them, and we need to build on the ones that work and abandon those that don’t. Continually arguing about the one idea to solve it all is not going to move us forward. Government is usually lacking in ideas and loathe to abandon ideas that are not effective. Tweaking the edges is not going to solve the problems of public education.

The sooner public education begins the prototyping new models and methods, the sooner we can learn more about the very definition of the problem we face. Each prototype offers clarity and insight about the very nature of the problem. Without making attempts to solve public educations problems we are limiting our understanding of just what the problem is.

Clarity will emerge. The questions of experience and expectation can be answered.

February 03, 2010

Public School Insights: Let's start with a big question. What is "design thinking?"

Kelley: To me, design thinking is basically a
methodology that allows people to have confidence in their creative
ability. Normally many people don't think of themselves as creative, or
they think that creativity comes from somewhere that they don't
know—like an angel appears and tells them the answer or gives them a
new idea.

So
design thinking is hopefully a framework that people can hang their
creative confidence on. We give people a step-by-step method on how to
more routinely be creative or more routinely innovate.

Public School Insights: Can you say a bit more about the difference between design thinking, in the 21st-century context, and analytical thinking?

Kelley: Sure. Analytical thinking is great. It’s
the way you learned to be step-by-step—to collect data, analyze it and
come up with a conclusion, like you did in science class. It is really
useful, and I hope people keep doing it. It's very important.

Design
thinking is more experimental and less step-by-step. It's fuzzier. It's
intuitive. It's empathic. We often say that it’s integrative thinking,
where you put together ideas from different sources—it’s synthesis.
This is a way of thinking that is not quite so linear, but you can
build confidence in it if you do it over and over again.

January 06, 2010

Can a field created and shaped during the Agricultural Age, managed with systems and processes from the Industrial age, struggling to come to grips with the passing Information Age and starring hesitantly at the current Conceptual Age ready students for the needs of and demands of the ages?

November 16, 2009

What follows is a quote from Peter Drucker,
but with an Education Innovation twist. I have removed words like
business, company, executive, and economics; and replaced them with
school(s), education, and principal.

“Schools prefer not to
abandon the old, the obsolescent, the no-longer-productive; they’d
rather hang on to it and keep on pouring money into it. Worse still,
they then assign their most capable people ‘defending’ the outworn in a
massive misallocation of the scarcest and most valuable resource—the
human resource that needs to be allocated to making tomorrow, if the
school is to have a tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow always arrives…It is
always different. And then even the mightiest school is in trouble if
it has not worked on the future. It will have lost distinction and
leadership—all that will remain is big-education overhead…Not having
dared to take of making the new happen, it perforce took the much
greater risk of being surprised by what did happen…And this is a risk
that even the largest and richest school cannot afford and that even
the smallest school need not run.”

“The principal has to accept
responsibility for making the future happen…It is the willingness to
tackle purposefully this, the last of the educational tasks in
education that distinguishes the great schools from the merely
competent one, and education builder from school principal’s office
occupant.”

October 15, 2009

Robert Alan Black Ph.D. lists 32 Traits of Creative People.I wonder if these might not make an interesting framework for a report card. Call it the report of the future, or Report Card 2.0.

sensitive

not motivated by money

sense of destiny

adaptable

tolerant of ambiguity

observant

perceive world differently

see possibilities

question asker

can synthesize correctly often intuitively

able to fantasize

flexible

fluent

imaginative

intuitive

original

ingenious

energetic

sense of humor

self-actualizing

self-disciplined

self-knowledgeable

specific interests

divergent thinker

curious

open-ended

independent

severely critical

non-conforming

confident

risk taker

persistent

Imagine the curriculum that would have to be created to generate evidence of the student's proficiency of these 32 traits. Imagine the learning opportunities that students would need to be afforded to measure their proficiency in these traits.

It could completely change education in some very important and fundamental ways.

September 21, 2009

As readers of this blog know, I believe that technology, education, marketing, and brands are on an eventual collision course that will create Educational Brands for teachers, schools, and districts. Teachers, schools, and districts will have marketing brands created by students, parents, test scores, and any number of available data streams in the coming years. Much as business has had to come to terms with their brand and reputation, so too, I believe, will teachers, schools, and districts have to come to terms with the need for brand management. Educator brand management.

2. What does your educational brand do for people—are they excited about you as a teacher? Do they want to tell everybody?

3. How would you feel if someone gave you your own business card? Does it impress you?

4. What does a your school website (or lack there of) say about your educational brand?

5. How do people find out about you as an educator?

6. How much marketing are you doing to make students, parents, and other school districts know about you?

7. How much money will you spend to attend educational trade shows, conferences, and networking events?

8. How often are you speaking or presenting at these educational events?

9. How often are you involved with organizing those educational events?

10. What are the many cost-effective ways you can better market your educational brand?

11. How comfortable are you with the new digital channels?

12. What kind of relationships are you forming at your school, in your district, in your community, and in the educational community? Are you a trusted educational adviser, an appreciated educational ally, or just another teacher?

12. How many websites, blogs, books, magazines, etc., that cover education are you currently reading (and have you thought about writing for them)?

13. What untold stories unfold every day in your classroom or at your school and how are your fellow teachers, school administration, district administration, students, parents, and the community informed of theses successes?

September 11, 2009

“The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.”Seth Godin

Comfortable. My guess is that many teachers would love to teach the same grade or subject, at the same school, in the same district, with the same teachers, for the entire length of their careers. It is safe, predictable, and comfortable. It is also dangerous to you becoming a better teacher.

Seth Godin, in his beautiful little book The Dip, explains why quitting, yes quitting, can sometimes be a valuable tool.

“Doug needs to leave for a very simple reason. He’s been branded. Everyone at the company has an expectation of who Doug is and what he can do.” Doug could be teacher at your school. He has taught the same subject or grade for several years. He is good at it. He is on the same committees year after year. He is good at that too. But is Doug growing as an educator? Are you?

“If he leaves and joins another company, he gets to reinvent himself.” Could a new school or grade level help you reinvent yourself? Could a new challenge be just the thing to push you out of your comfortable safe zone, and into a new period of challenge and growth?

According to Seth Godin,“If you are trying to succeed in a job or a relationship or a task, you’re either moving forward, falling behind, or standing still. There are only three choices.” Obviously we don’t want to be falling behind. Standing still is a very easy and very common choice. Standing still is safe. Standing still is predictable. Standing still is comfortable.

But is that going to improve you as an educator? Is that going to improve education? Obviously, the answer is no. So that leaves us with the choice but to move forward. According to Seth, “Measurable progress doesn’t have to be a raise or a promotion.” We don’t control those sorts of things in education anyways, but Seth also says, “The challenge, then is to surface new milestones in areas where you have previously expected to find none.”

So what new milestones could you set for yourself today? What new skill could you develop? I started “TWittering” and getting interested in using the web as a collaboration tool. What new skill could you develop? I moved out the classroom and into a management position. I try to speak Spanish to my parents. I tying some very uncomfortable things. I still have a goal of earning my PhD or EdD. What goals or milestones could you set for yourself? What are you doing that is "uncomfortable?"